To return to the great visitation of birds in December. I am sure that very many of these, exhausted by hunger and cold, dropped out of the winged army at the extremity of Cornwall, and remained there until the end of the cold season. At all events, when I returned to the scene in January, I noticed a very great increase in the number of wintering birds, particularly starlings, larks, song-thrushes, fieldfares and redwings. The weather continued cold and rough, with storms of wind and sleet and occasional flurries of snow, until January 21, when the cold became intense, and that rare phenomenon in West Cornwall, a severe frost, began, which lasted several days, and was said by some of the old natives to be the greatest frost in forty years, while others affirmed they had not experienced anything like it in their lives.
I was staying at Zennor at the time--that lonely little village nestling among its furze thickets and stone hedges, with the rough granite hills, clothed in brown dead bracken, before it and the black granite cliffs and sea behind. I had been amusing myself by feeding a few birds that came to the door, and now my small company of pensioners, suddenly grown tame, began to interest me very much. There was no garden to the house, which was situated in the centre of the village, with the church on one side and the inn on the other--nothing but the road, broadening out into a wide bare space on which my window looked, with a stone hedge and a fountain of gushing water on the other side, where the people dipped their buckets and the animals came to drink. Here the cows came on their way to and from the farm, and the pigs and dogs and a flock of geese; and as some of these animals were always about, they very naturally helped themselves to the bread they found in the public road. Fortunately the ground-floor window had a raised stone platform before it, surrounded by iron railings, and I started putting out the food for the birds in this area. The cows and pigs could not get in there, but some of the most intelligent of the village dogs managed to get a share by thrusting their paws far in and dragging the scraps out, and the geese would follow suit, putting their long necks between the rails. The birds, however, fared better than before; thrushes, blackbirds, robins, dunnocks, pied wagtails, meadow pipits and one grey wagtail were the usual feeders; the daws, too, would occasionally pluck up courage enough to drop down between the railings and snatch up something.